I have about 8-10 sites that I actively manage, and in the past week, about 7 of them have completely disappeared from their search engine positions. All older sites that have had good rankings for some time now. I'm sure they'll all pop back up on the radar soon, but it's strange that all of them are just plain gone right now...and at the same time. Maybe the big "G" is trying to tell me something.
Yep that's happened to me. It's not too surprising for that to happen when one person manages multiple websites. It's easy to get lazy and try to take shortcuts. That includes things like using templates and reusing code. Also it's easy to end up with the same linking patterns across multiple sites. Often when you make a mistake on one website, it is also made on many of your other websites. Another thing that can happen is that most or all of those websites are hosted on the same server. Once that server has some type of outage, all of your sites get affected.
Oh yea, 14 sites went Poof! The cause was our cross linking on the same hosting service (called SubNet Crossliking) and G does not like it. In short, don't link sites that are on the same IP Address or Hosting Services.
I'm not part of a link farm, but some of my sites do link up with others and they're on the same IP. Seems odd that it they would all of a sudden be affected, after a year or more of good, stable search engine rankings.
Happened to me once when my hosting account was suspended for not settling the bill. None of the sites were accessible and they all dropped off the search engines. Thankfully none of them were money-makers at the time
Oh, stop that jibber jabber! If you were right (I'm glad you're not) all the thousands of sites using Godaddy and other "budget" shared hosting would be in deep trouble. About interlinking your own sites. It is very simple - if your sites are on different topics, interlink them with a NOFOLLOW attribute. If the sites compliment each other and are on similar topic, interlink them without anxiety. I have a successful interlinked network of similar sites that is on top10 of Google for more than 5 years. And all sites are on the same IP with approximately a thousand of other sites. Sato, do you use Google Webmaster tools? What messages you get there? It is hard to tell what's gone wrong without seeing the sites. Are those from your sig the sites in question? You cannot get the ban for things that can be theoretically done by your competitor. So, if I take three of your sites and apply a similar linking pattern to them, I get you a ban? Ah, Lord Albert! Where are you coming from, mate? The Moon? Good then, I'm off to do a bit of harm to Coke website. I wanna rank #1 for "lemonade" LOL No offence, if you PM me your stuff, I would look and see if I can spot something. Maybe other DP guys can volunteer to do the same.